Death happens. Why not make it interesting?
The online competition to guess which famous people won't make it to the end of the current year. If they're elderly, ill, or just live a high-risk lifestyle, stick 'em in your team, and for each one whose death you correctly predict, you'll score points. DDP was dreamt up in Derby, England (hence the name...) by Big Iain back in 1996. Other hosts: Siegfried Baboon and Rude Kid (2003-7), Octopus of Odstock (2008-9, first tenure), The Man in Black (2010-17), Spade Cooley (2018-19), msc (2020-21), Grim Up North (2020-22), Reptile (2020-23), and Death Impends (2022-2025). Now the Committee of Banana (2023), time (2024), the returning Octopus of Odstock (2026) and the deadpooling equivalent of a gap year temp Marlfox (2026) oversee the biggest deadpool going...
D-DEAD Only one French unit – the Fusiliers Marins Commandos captained by Philippe Kieffer – partook in the beach-storming Normandy landings that eventually freed their homeland. Over half the squad died at D-Day, and the death of Léon Gautier marks the complete extinction of the unit. Gautier fought in the Congo, Syria, and Lebanon before […]
GONE WITH A VENGENACE Premature obituaries are not uncommon, but it’s a little more peculiar for most of the UK tabloids to run with a death hoax (of which only The Mirror mea culpa’d) and then forget the person existed once they actually died. Though in fairness, Carmen Sevilla forgot she existed too. Hailing from […]
JOHN B. DEADENOUGH For every Australian MP or supporting cast member of a 70s US sitcom assured a QO by our increasingly lax UK media landscape, one field that’s decreased in obitability is science Nobel laureates. Winning the dynamite gong for chemistry or physics went from “assured Telegraph obit within a month” in 2013 to […]
DISCONNECT Lowell Weicker was the last Republican senator to represent Connecticut, but the Democratic victory in his 1988 defeat proved a Pyrrhic one for Team Donkey as it gave them Joe Lieberman. Indeed, the liberal Weicker was such a pre-Gingrich relic that Lieberman challenged him from the right. Weicker first gained attention as the first […]
AVAST! Yarrrr, that pirate guy at the Queen’s funeral has walked the plank aged 97. David Ogilvy, 13th Earl of Airlie, was a longtime matey of the royal family who was the last surviving participant of the coronation of George VI and a former Lord Chamberlain. A frail, eyepatched Ogilvy turned up at Her Maj’s […]
DEATH TALK WITH SUE JOHANSON Sue Johanson was essentially the Canadian Dr. Ruth, with a long career in sex therapy that translated to a fruitful renaissance as a talk show host. Johanson was trained as a nurse by stodgy nuns who didn’t discuss sex and ultimately sparked a rebellious flame in Johanson, who preferred to […]
OFF THE MARKOWITZ Economist Harry Markowitz has died aged 95. His main economic legacy was “modern portfolio theory”, which promoted the idea of diversifying one’s assets in an investment portfolio. He postulated that including a mix of risky and safe assets was sounder than putting all your eggs in one basket. So riveting that he […]
TONY BURIED Another one for the recent pile of billionaire deaths comes via natural causes rather than in a flimsy submarine propelled by a video game controller. Tony Murray had a keener sense of self-preservation than that – rather than face certain death as a Jew in Vichy France, he hightailed to Britain in 1940. […]
GLENDA IS MISSING Widely respected actress and politician Glenda Jackson has died aged 87. She made her first splash on the stage, with her breakout role as an insane asylum inmate emulating Charlotte Corday in Marat/Sade. She continued to dazzle theatrically with a breadth of performances that included multiple Shakespeare roles and Eugene O’Neill play […]
BUNGLE BUNGLED! Italian mogul, political Lazarus, and party animal Silvio Berlusconi has died aged 86. Shockingly, the cause was leukaemia, rather than a Nelson Rockefeller-style exit. He muscled his way into the Italian elite with a string of successful business ventures, including founding dominant mass media corporation Mediaset and rescuing AC Milan from the brink. […]
